How do I pick education sessions to see at Greenbuild?

What sessions should you attend at Greenbuild 2019?

What else is going on at Greenbuild in Atlanta?

The Building Science Podcast is a production of Positive Energy, a residentially focused engineering firm in Austin.

https://app.stitcher.com/splayer/f/175346/57610511

This is one long-form podcast I watch for in my feed so I can set aside time (typically an hour) on a flight or long drive to really listen. They’ve been podcasting since 2015 when they grabbed my attention with an episode about PCM. The hosts explore various technical aspects of the built environment from a people-centric perspective.

The second decade of the AIA 2030 Commitment is approaching. In this example episode of Building Science, architect Nathan Kipnis FAIA of Chicago’s Kipnis Architecture + Planning talks about sustainability in the firm’s culture, the energy focus and getting client commitments. Over 500 A/E/P firms have adopted the AIA 2030 Commitment, launched in 2009 to support the 2030 Challenge. Kipnis is an architecture school graduate of my alma mater Arizona State University and Co-chair of the AIA National 2030 Commitment Working Group.

Podcast co-hosts Kristof Irwin PE and Miguel Walker dive into the topic of the month with wide-eyed fascination. Irwin is a principal of the firm and its lead engineer. Walker is Positive Energy’s chief rainmaker and a board member of Passive House Austin. The duo does a good job of keeping up a monthly podcast schedule. Production quality varies, but the discussions are always thought provoking and deserve a place in the environment podcast anthology.

Please share your thoughts with us and your friends by posting this on your favorite social media network. We’ve provided sharing buttons to make it easy. Mention @BldgScienceATX and @Cleantech. You can also send comments to me by email.

Computers keep getting smaller and cheaper. Everything in our lives is becoming smart and connected. We are just scratching the surface of how technology will change our lives in the next 10 to 15 years, Steve Brown told an audience of energy utility representatives.

Mr. Brown is a futurist who helps large companies and industry organizations understand trends so they can plan for where the world is going. He gave a keynote address at the 2018 Efficiency Exchange conference hosted by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance and Bonneville Power Administration.

Six technologies will shape the near future for every industry, including energy utilities, Mr. Brown said, and “each technology is about building more bridges between the physical world that we inhabit and the digital world where technology is constantly advancing.”

The big six technologies of the future

In his 15 years at Intel, Steve Brown, an engineer by training, worked at the forefront of digital computing, so he knows about technology. He also worked for a cultural anthropologist at Intel, so he understands how people think about and react to change. And he worked on early Energy Star standards for PCs.

Artificial intelligence tops his list of the big six technologies of the future.

“Artificial intelligence is a big, big deal,” Mr. Brown said. “AI is a completely different type of computing than the digital computing we use today. You program AI computers by training them and showing them data.” AI enables the digital world to learn and imagine.

I caught up with Mr. Brown after his talk and asked him how he would prioritize these six technologies. Is there one we should be paying the most attention to? “If I had to pick just one, it would be AI,” he told me. “If we thought the last 40 years was amazing, in the next 10 years we are likely to see more change in our lives than in the last 40 because of AI’s capabilities. The energy industry should be paying attention to it.”

“You can think of AI as the second coming of computing,” he said in his keynote address, “one that is able to solve a completely different kind of problems.” Self-driving cars would not be possible without AI.

The internet of things is giving the world a nervous system by implanting sensors everywhere. You’re already carrying 8 or 9 sensor that are built into the phone in your pocket. Mr. Brown said there will be around 100 trillion sensors in the world by 2030, telling digital systems what’s happening in their and our physical environment.

“With IoT we can create control loops, where we sense something in the physical world and use that to make a decision and act on it in the digital world,” Mr. Brown told me later. “If we can use AI and sensors to look for patterns in the way people use energy, we have more of an ability to optimize the usage of that energy.”

He said several companies are starting to use AI to look for patterns in people’s usage of energy and coach consumers on how to use less. One IoT example in his presentation was a wallet that becomes harder to open when the owner’s bank balance is low.

In an audience of 400 energy efficiency experts, I wasn’t the only one wondering how we could make a switch harder to turn on when electricity is more expensive.

Autonomous machines are AI inside of robots. Mainstream robots today can’t understand much about the world around them, but with AI they will be able to safely interact with humans in more meaningful ways. Autonomous machines enable the digital world to act.

Blockchain is the technology underlying crypto currencies. “I prefer to think of blockchain as a new platform upon which people will create incredible new value,” Mr. Brown said, “and crypto currency is one of the tricks that make blockchain work.”

Mr. Brown described blockchain as a fancy database, distributed across many computers, with no central owner, and all the data is stored with military-grade encryption. “Blockchain allows us to create decentralized applications, like a social media platform without one central company in control of it.”

Blockchain also enables distributed open-source development of applications as well as shared ownership in small portions of projects. Think community solar, with many owners of small shares coming together to make the project a reality.

If you’re tired of your mobile phone’s slow and intermittent internet connection, hang on, Mr. Brown said, 5G is coming. “The Internet of things will need a constant connection and low latency,” he said. “5G networks don’t just make data go faster, they make connections more reliable.”

One technology that will need 5G’s always-on broadband is augmented reality.

“Augmented reality takes digital content and overlays it on the physical world,” Mr. Brown said. “Essentially the world becomes your display.” He showed a short video illustrating some of the many possibilities for augmented reality, which goes far beyond virtual reality in its capabilities.

How the big six technologies combine to shape the future

Mr. Brown gave some examples of how these six technologies will come together to change the world we live in a decade or more from now.

“Cobots” are robots that will work alongside humans. These AI coworkers will be able to train people on the job, perform quality assurance in manufacturing, and alert equipment owners to upcoming maintenance needs.

AI-enabled autonomous cars will become a shared resource. “We are about to make a major leap in transportation,” Mr. Brown said. We won’t need nearly as many cars, but they will all be electric. Makers and nations are committed to zero emissions vehicles. Uber is experimenting with air taxis.

“Things are going to flip quite quickly, and that’s going to mean people want a lot more electricity.” Electric vehicles and blockchain, among other upcoming technologies, consume enormous amounts of energy. But these trends portend some good news for renewables: more storage.

Electric cars are a giant battery, Mr. Brown said. “Utilities could get into the car fleet business. Why let Uber do that? EVs could become grid level storage.”

What about all that privacy and cybersecurity stuff?

I asked Mr. Brown about privacy and security, given the challenges we already have without these new technologies, and the risk aversion of utilities.

“Privacy matters, and security matters more,” he told me. “People are willing to give up privacy so that companies can gather the data they need to better serve their customers. Make it opt in. Promise security. Explain the benefits and be transparent.”

In his keynote speech, Mr. Brown said that regulation is one tool for keeping up with these technological advances – and keeping them out of manipulative hands – “but fundamentally we need to have a cultural conversation about how we embrace technology,” he told the audience.

“I deputize you as deputy futurists to go have this conversation about the world we want to build and the world we want to avoid. Conversation before regulation.”

“You have a very bright future,” Mr. Brown said in closing. “Your customers are going to go through rapid changes, and so are you.”

The way energy efficiency incentives programs work almost everywhere in the United States, the utility takes all the risk. That’s because the customer gets the incentive payment up front, whether or not any energy is actually saved by the energy efficiency measures the utility paid for.

Pay-for-Performance programs are an emerging utility incentive model. Conceived in Seattle, Pay-For-Performance programs are different, including the way savings and incentive payments are expected to drive initial investments, and the emphasis on ongoing operations and maintenance.

P4P spreads risk by not paying all the incentives up front, instead measuring actual savings and making monthly or annual payments to the participating customer. Bigger savings, bigger check.

The greatest risk of Pay-For-Performance programs lay in the unknowns: it had seldom been tried. So Seattle authorized Seattle City Light to run a very limited commercial building pilot of Pay-For-Performance in 2012, the first of its kind in the country. The three-building pilot program ran from 2013 to 2016.

Today the three local utilities – Puget Sound Energy, Seattle City Light, and Snohomish PUD – are implementing performance-based incentives with varying degrees of caution. Several other utilities around the country are now experimenting with them in commercial buildings, and PG&E is piloting a residential program.

DURING THE SEATTLE PILOT, Stan Price was the executive director of the Northwest Energy Efficiency Council, which advocated for Pay-for-Performance. He believes P4P is the best next move for utility-incentivized energy efficiency in the commercial building sector.

“The deemed-savings method worked for 30 years of energy efficiency incentives. But now we have more data,” says Mr. Price. “We know more about how buildings work.”

Building energy models are sophisticated now, making the performance method possible by providing a baseline for normalized metered energy consumption and savings.

Black-and-white savings calculations make utilities more comfortable, but customer acceptance has more to do with their gray matter.

“We spent years trying to convince customers that energy savings are opex savings and affect the bottom line just like top-line revenue,” says Mr. Price. “P4P translates the savings into an annualized revenue stream, so finance people finally get it” – and, he hopes, will be more motivated to participate.

The flexibility of performance-based incentives should be another factor in persuading building owners to participate. Instead of picking from a list of approved measures, participants can find creative ways to eliminate energy waste.

THAT DOESN’T MEAN P4P programs are “measure blind.” Yes, spreading the risk means utilities can be more agnostic about how energy is saved, but not completely.

For one thing, measures with a predictably long life are worth more to a utility than savings that might fade quickly after the last rebate check, says Joseph Fernandi of Seattle City Light.

City Light and PSE both require a 15% immediate energy reduction as a way to force capital expenditures into the P4P measure mix. Otherwise, efficiency measures based purely on behavior change, or operations and maintenance, take longer to ramp up and don’t have the reliable persistence of capex investments.

“It’s about how we marble these things together,” says Mr. Price, “because with P4P we’re taking a whole building approach, a holistic view.”

Even though specifics shouldn’t matter, Snohomish PUD wants to know what’s being implemented. Jessica Mitchell of SnoPUD explains that it has to do with the financing mechanism. The annualized incentive payments are a bankable revenue stream. Should the utility cancel the contract, there needs to be a final payment – and to calculate that payment, the utility needs to know the measures so they can value them.

At this early stage of pay-for-performance programs, learning from the measure mix is important to utilities. Mr. Fernandi of Seattle City Light says that assumptions about the measure mix and their durability inform the incentive dollar amounts the utility establishes for performance-based programs.

HOW MUCH SAVINGS are we talking about? Seattle City Light hopes to see 40 percent energy savings over the life of a P4P program based on results from the pilot program.

That’s not as aggressive as it sounds, Mr. Price says. “The buildings that participated in Seattle’s pilot were already well performing buildings, so it’s possible we’ve been undercounting the viability of the resource.”

Stan Price has high expectations not only for the savings, but for the positive changes that Pay-for-Performance can bring to utility-run energy efficiency programs.

“Deemed savings overemphasizes the easy savings to meet annual efficiency goals,” Mr. Price says, referring to that model as “energy efficiency 1.0.”

“I hope a matured Pay-for-Performance model will blow that up, replacing it with energy efficiency 2.0, and change how we think about energy efficiency incentives.”

Stan Price, Jessica Mitchell and Joe Fernandi, together with PSE’s Corey Corbett, spoke on a panel at Washington’s Energy Future Conference.

Each Earth Day, which is the anniversary of the founding of Energy Priorities, I hope it will be the year when sustainable energy policy will live up to the unbridled optimism I felt in 2004. I have been scrounging in recent months for ways to restock that optimism, and I found plenty.

Sustainable energy has survived retropolicy administrations before. Everyday environmentalists don’t remember the incoming George W. Bush administration as being so threatening because we didn’t have Facebook and Twitter back then. As expected, that administration was in the pockets of the fossil fuel industries. It was damaging, but not the end of the world.

Sustainable energy has survived an obstructionist Congress before. It was in exactly that political climate that the United States joined the rest of the world in the Paris climate accord, which large businesses including some in utilities, oil, autos and coal still defend.

“Why the US should stay in the Paris climate agreement”
Ban Ki-Moon and Robert Stavins in The Boston Globe

Granted, the outlook has taken a turn for the worst. If that wasn’t evident on inauguration day when the Republican administration’s “America First” philosophy put sustainable energy last, then it is evident today as that embryonic government tries to back out of the Paris Agreement and dismantle renewable energy subsidies, the EPA, and Energy Star.

Gloomy headlines notwithstanding, here are five reasons I feel optimistic for sustainable energy this year:

Businesses and consumers are global.

Not only is the rest of the world way ahead of the United States on sustainability, it is not slowing down. U.S. businesses are working to minimize that gap because being behind will limit growth. Outside this country there is no uncertainty or doubt about global warming; corporate silence on greenhouse gas emissions is complicity in the status quo.

Today it is hard to find a business of any size that confines its businesses within our borders. (My college advisors found it curious, decades ago, that I wanted to study small business and international business. Because, I said: soon all business would be global.) Globalism is real, it benefits Americans, and it’s here to stay.

Many major U.S. companies have embraced sustainable energy as part of broader efforts to bolster their triple bottom line. They see that their global marketplace is made up of consumers who prefer and, in the long run, will demand responsible products made by sustainability-minded businesses.

“Is American Enterprise More Powerful Than The President Of The United States?”
Ken Silverstein in FORBES

Investors hold the purse strings.

Even if environmental policies are rolled back, investors have shown that they won’t stand for giving businesses carte blanche to disregard environmental governance. Pension fund investors and university stakeholders have demanded divestiture from polluting businesses. Some of the largest funds have championed responsible investing for a decade or longer. Activist investors, even conservative institutional investors, can do the same in any public company including utilities.

“Investors Sharpen Focus on Social and Environmental Risks to Stocks”
Randall Smith in The New York Times

States are stepping up climate policy.

States have financial influence on the national stage. Some states will meet climate action commitments without the Paris agreement, which is good PR for Governors.

The states, not feds, make utility regulatory decisions about how much to support renewables and efficiency. And utilities always think far beyond the current administration, often planning 40 to 60 years out.

Governors can insist that “investing in American infrastructure” includes sustainable energy and a smarter grid. Or at least refuse to participate in building dead-end fossil fuel infrastructure like oil pipelines and coal terminals.

States also have legislative options including taxation. State-level carbon tax policies are an option for financially strapped states. A well crafted price on carbon applied to energy production and transportation fuels should be possible in several states.

To “backstop” is to pass state regulations replicating hard-earned federal regs that the GOP administration may let backslide by reversing or simply not enforcing them. And as new fed standards stall, states can set their own efficiency standards, for example forcing old energy-hog versions of appliances and machinery off the market.

Why did I prioritize businesses before the states? For one simple reason: states court businesses to locate and stay in their states. When big business talks, governors listen.

“With Trump in White House, states must take the lead on climate change”
U.S. Rep. Jared Polis of Boulder in The Denver Post

Cities are where we live.

People find it easier to support hometown initiatives that affect them and people they know directly. And it’s easier to communicate about those initiatives to a city-scale audience with a shared experience.

In Seattle, my home city, we identify with our city and feel proud of it, even when life isn’t peachy. Residents of most cities can say the same. There’s a sense of bonding together against a harsh world – or, at least, against competing sports teams.

If you’re a behavioral psychology nerd this is the in-group, or if you read a lot of Cialdini you know it as a unity principle.

Taken to the city council level, low-income communities can have outsize influence on clean energy, air and water. Watch what is happening with environmental justice communities, e.g., WE ACT in New York.

City policies can champion ideas that spread around the globe. Copenhagen taught the world how to do bicycle lanes, and Paris launched bike sharing, both of which have sprouted in other cities around the world. City ideas can champion policies that spread, too. Mayors should stand up for a good idea, even if they think it’s impossible in their city, because other cities will be inspired.

“Under Trump, look to cities and metros to power America forward”
Bruce Katz on Brookings.edu

Positioning is flexible.

The Republican administration will work to position renewable energy and efficiency as parts of a liberal climate conspiracy. That position can be counteracted.

Repositioning allows you to change the message without changing the end goal. How should sustainable energy be repositioned? Two important marketing lessons apply today more than before.

Solve the right problem.

First, we learned people buy what they want, not what companies wish they wanted. Case in point: Prospects for home energy efficiency respond better to messages of comfort than energy savings.

That’s an example of a principle that says businesses and consumers ultimately strive to make progress toward their ideal world. Their buying decisions are tightly coupled with the next step in that direction. For some it’s simple — saving money, or keeping up with the Joneses — but for many it is more complex.

Marketing messages can be constructed to appeal to multiple drivers. Businesses justify decisions based on factors such as revenue protection, building brand loyalty, or reducing compliance risk, as well as industry-specific financial metrics. Energy efficiency can be positioned to align with all of those.

Speak the right language.

Second, we mustn’t ignore that portion of the market that says they don’t care about the environment. George Lakoff explains very well why conservatives who disavow any belief or complicity in climate change will justify buying solar panels because they want to be energy independent.

That independence aligns with their inherent need to feel personally responsible. They might never believe that global warming is anthropomorphic, but they will believe that their utility is under attack by liberal policies and cannot be relied on to supply energy.

I am not suggesting that you launch any conspiracy theories. What I recommend is to look at the language you use in marketing sustainable energy and consider how to match benefits with conservative value drivers like responsibility, self-reliance and fatherhood.

Happy Earth Day. Keep up the good work. Look away from the daily drumbeat of negative headlines and focus on preparing for the retropolicy of the next four to eight years. Luck hasn’t created a national permanent shift to cleaner energy, but your perseverance will.

Comments? Please include your colleagues in your comments on social media by sharing this. Our social links are on this page including our LinkedIn Group and Facebook Page. On the other hand, if launching social media draws you down a rabbit hole of pessimistic headlines, you’re welcome to e-mail me instead.